The processing of invoices by means of electronic data records of the invoices is known from the state-of-the-art. Such data records are used in enterprise business software to store the financial data related with a sale of a product, and to have these data available for credit management and risk management purposes. However, although the data are stored in the computer system of the respective company (enterprise), it is not in any case certain, whether the invoice has been actually paid or not or whether a dispute has been opened on the invoice or on the whole sale or on the order process or on contract issues or other problems that will prevent a payment of an invoice. Consequently, if the management of the enterprise analyses the financial situation on the basis of uncertain data of invoices, the result may be misleading and may show that financial situation of the enterprise which is different from the real financial situation. Further, the company may not be aware of the need to collect the cash from active debts, and even if the company is aware, it is not in any case clear, on which part of the outstanding invoices the efforts of cash collecting should be focused. This results particularly in a technical problem, if a large number of invoices, which have been sent to a plurality of customers, have to be processed by the computer system. From the technical point of view, frequent searching of data bases with complex searching conditions have to be made, which stress the system performance or, in other words cause expenditures for computing power and storage capacity.
Thus, there is a need for a method, software application and/or data processing system providing a more efficient solution of at least a part of the problems described above; particularly it is desirable to provide a software application having a mechanism for more efficiently running the computer system and enabling a better processing of invoices.
The above description is based on the knowledge of the present inventors and not necessarily that known in the art.